More than 9,000 kilometers away in Accra, architect, academic and author Lesley Lokko founded the African Futures Institute, an education and critical thinking platform dedicated to envisioning Africa’s future from within the continent itself. Since its inception, the African Futures Institute has expanded its reach into curatorial practice and exhibition organization, cementing its international reputation through its participation in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023. This institution recognizes that, in the youngest and most rapidly urbanizing continent on the planet, there is an urgent need to rethink how architects and urban planners—not just for the future of Africa, but with the understanding that that future affects the entire world.
This African educational organization establishes itself as a platform to imagine the African future from within the continent itself, focusing on issues such as decolonization, climate change, migration and social justice. In her vision, architecture is the ability to imagine and build futures in which regeneration and social justice are intertwined, turning utopia into a living practice, a collective process and the act of rewriting the present.
exhibition image from Mugak/ Biennale 2025 | image by Mikel Blasco
lesley lokko at the opening of Mugak/ Biennial 2025 | image by Mikel Blasco
The threshold: meeting point of utopia and dystopia
Between the promise of a better future and the fear of its oppressive displacement, the thin line that separates utopia from dystopia becomes fertile ground for architectural and social imagination. This in-between space, where the ideal merges with the precarious and the collective with the temporary, reveals the fragility of our ways of life.
Inverted Awnings, by architect Aristide Antonas, embodies this ambiguity: beds suspended in abandoned buildings reverse the domestic logic, freeing up space for living together and creating new bonds. But this same gesture that promises community also evokes the precariousness of refuge, the aftermath of disaster, and contemporary vulnerability. Anton’s work appeared in Athens between 2010 and 2012, a period marked by economic collapse and the proliferation of functional ruins. Its aim is not to strengthen individual autonomy, but to create conditions for collective practices and encounters. The project is also linked to the idea of the “empty university”, which proposes to bring together immigrants and local students in shared environments – not as a substitute for housing for the poor, but as an experiment in coexistence based on contingency and the reuse of existing infrastructure.
In this unresolved tension between utopia and dystopia, a field of reflection opens up on how to imagine the public without denying the instability that sustains it. It is both a critique of the inaccessibility of housing and an exercise that oscillates between utopia – the imagination of alternative ways of coexistence – and dystopia – through the inevitable reminder of refugee camps and other conflicts, recalling the cruelty of forced displacement and contemporary precarity.
Today, largely overtaken by the surrounding reality, utopias seem to have fallen into disrepute. The prevailing pragmatism limits the space to imagine better futures. An absence full of dangers, because, as the French philosopher and anthropologist Paul Ricoeur warns, “a society without utopia is a society without purpose, a society without direction.”
Inverted Awnings | The image was provided by Aristides Antonas
image of exhibition “Inverted Awnings” by Aristides Antonas | image by Mikel Blasco
Maria Arana Zubiate | image by Olga Ruiz
Maria Arana Zubiate is an architect, researcher and curator. He is a founding partner of Urbanbat, a social initiative cooperative dedicated to researching and producing critical culture for urban transformations. She has curated programs for Azkuna Zentroa-Alhóndiga Bilbao, Spain’s Ministry of Culture, and co-director for 14 years of URBANBATfest, Bilbao’s annual festival of architecture, urbanism and social innovation. She is currently the curator of the Mugak/Basque Country International Architecture Biennale.
